Gran

I've been thinking a lot about the things I'll remember about Gran: her flapjack and bread and butter pudding; how – as a child – I loved to help her preparing dinner on our regular Wednesday evening visits; the armies of Father Christmas' and snowmen she knitted for the Women’s Institute; her pride in her garden and the way she'd occasionally come out with a little gem of a fact that she'd picked up somewhere (on the radio or in Readers’ Digest probably) - I'll always remember where I was at lunchtime on 7 August 1990 because she and Grampy had taken me and my brother for a picnic at Meldon Reservoir and as we ate lunch, Gran announced that it was 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0 - 12.34 and 56 seconds on 7/8/90 - a once-in-a-century moment!

Fifteen years ago, I interviewed Gran for one of my University assignments.  We talked quite a lot about her childhood, family and about school in Chudleigh Knighton and Mamhead.  She recalled living in a farm cottage where she had to go out to the well to get water and how it was the children's job to chop up the kindling for the fire.  It was important, she remembered, because you couldn't have a cup of tea until you'd got the fire going.  At school, she remembered being good at needlework and enjoying oral arithmetic.

She told me about her time in domestic service, firstly at the Manor House in Torquay for Sir Francis Layland-Barrett.  She remembered her first Christmas there when there was a big Christmas party attended by the Emperor Haille Selassi, which must have been when he was in exile after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia.  Gran missed the party though - she was sent home with Housemaid's Knee!  She also remembered the arrival of refugees from Austria.  From there, she went to be a cooks-mate in a house at Haytor, before being called up during the Second World War to work in a factory in Salisbury making piston-rings for aircraft.  

The move on her own to Salisbury was hard after living in close-knit communities, whether at home on the farm and in small villages or in the households in which she worked.  Somewhat remarkably, she described her good fortune in being protected from the worst of the war at the same time as recalling an air-raid in Salisbury and returning from the shelters to find shrapnel that had fallen through the factory roof on to the bench beside where she had been sitting and German aircraft machine-gunning the seafront in Torquay as she and her sister met for a drink on one of the occasions she returned to Devon.

I've reflected many times over the years on my interview with Gran.  During the course of the interview, she referred to one thing or another as being good preparation or good training - domestic service, for example - so toward the end of the interview I asked her what it had been preparation and training for.  She answered that it was good training for housekeeping and running your own home, looking after yourself and looking after other people.

Growing up in a different era when the role of women in society had changed utterly, it was hard to understand - as a child - the role that someone like Gran had played.  Moreover, she was always a small, frail, reserved lady and it was too easy to see her as quite insignificant.  Interviewing her as I did shone a whole new light on the real significance of her life.  It was all about family.  She had grown up in a close-knit family and without doubt, her own mother was a role model for her.  She viewed domestic servitude as training for her own future as a mother and grandmother and eventually, things went full-circle and her life was completed with her own family.  She really had just one job in life, which was to care for all of us in her family.  As she said in her own words, 'That is most important: family - more important than anything, I think, is family togetherness.'  Her devotion to all of us was very deliberate.  It was a selfless job and one in which, I know, she took great joy.  I feel very blessed to have had such a remarkable woman as a grandmother.

Gran's legacy is easy to see: it's in all of us in her family, whether in the pride her own children take in their gardens or in my love of cooking, which I'm sure is largely thanks to helping Gran on Wednesday evenings.  For her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it's in our own wonderful mothers.  Above all, it's in our family-togetherness, which was so valuable to her and, for someone like me who daily sees the consequences of fractured families, its value is beyond measure.

We – her family – are all so fortunate to have been so well loved by Gran.  She took great pride in us and I, for one, am very proud of her.